firm. No attempt is made to justify Henry in taking the step which broke his wife's heart; his pretended scruples we naturally set down to hypocrisy or to the interested sophistry of a selfish voluptuary; all our sympathies are enlisted in her favor. And yet with him is the victory; on him and on his shallow and frivolous consort are lavished all the blessings of Providence and of prophecy. These are not the ethics of Shakespeare.

Not less perplexing are the peculiarities of the style and the versification. In some parts, notably in the first and second scenes of the first act, in the scene between the old lady and Anne Bullen, in the trial scene, in the speeches interchanged between the King and Wolsey in the second scene of the third act, in the first and in the opening of the second scene of the fifth act, we have all the unmistakable characteristics of Shakespeare's later style the note of Cymbeline, of The Winter's Tale and of The Tempest. But in other parts of the play-in the third and fourth scenes, for example, of the first act, in the first and second scenes of the second act, in nearly the whole of the third act, and in the christening scene in the fifth act-the note entirely changes. In the style terseness and nerve dissolve in fluidity and diffuseness, expression takes a florid tinge, and rhetoric everywhere predominates. The ear at once perceives that in the verse rhythm and cadence have entirely changed, both have a studied variety, with, however, a monotonous insistence on redundant syllables at the end of the lines. Whoever will compare the following passages will at once perceive how in point of phrase and rhythm they are essentially distinguished:

Be advis'd:

Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot That it do singe yourself; we may outrun By violent swiftness that which we run at, And lose by overrunning. Know you not, The fire that mounts the liquor till 't run o'er,

In seeming to augment it wastes it?

and:

So, farewell to the little good you bear me. Farewell, a long farewell, to all my great

ness!

This is the state of man: To-day he puts

forth

The tender leaves of hope; to-morrow blos

soms,

And bears his blushing honors thick upon him.

All the rhetorical and, as a rule, the less successful scenes in the play, dramatically speaking, belong to the portions written in this last style. Of the semblance of this style and of its general correspondence in color, tone, lexis, rhythm, and cadence to the style most characteristic of John Fletcher there can be no question. And in this fact the late Mr. James Spedding found the solution of the anomalies presented by Shakespeare's most perplexing drama. His theory was a plausible one. It is of course quite apparent that this play is, as Coleridge conjectured, a gelegenheitsgedicht, that it was designed for production on some important state occasion, such as a royal marriage which it was particularly desirable to associate with the interests of Protestantism. In the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth with the Prince Palatine of the Rhine we have precisely such an occasion; and we know as a matter of fact that the play was produced at the Globe Theatre about three months after the marriage was celebrated. Mr. Spedding's contention, or rather conjecture, is that Shakespeare had been working at a historical drama on the subject of Henry VIII., and had proceeded perhaps as far as the third act when pressure was put upon him to provide a play for the important public function; that unable or unwilling to do so, he submitted instead his unfinished drama, and that this drama was adapted to the occasion and completed by Fletcher. This, argues Mr. Spedding, not only accounts for the infirmities in the structure of the work and in its defective ethic, but for the comparative feebleness and languor of certain portions of it, and, above all, for the characteristics of the diction and versification where they differ from those peculiar to Shakespeare's later style.

And now let us see what this theory compels us to accept. We are to credit Fletcher with the last speeches of Buckingham, with the powerful and pathetic scene between the Queen, Wolsey, and Campeius: with the greater part of the fall of Wolsey, with his fa

mous soliloquy, with his noble speech to Cromwell, with Griffith's character of him, and proh pudor with the death of the Queen. Fletcher has left us ample means of judging of his powers and much which may be placed in direct parallel with what is here ascribed to him, and to say that he was equal to the composition of any of these scenes and passages is to say what is refuted by the very best of what in a similar vein he has left us. He could no more have written Wolsey's two great speeches and the death of Katharine than he could have written Lear or Macbeth. Fletcher was not in the habit of parodying himself, but he was very much in the habit of parodying Shakespeare. According to Mr. Spedding, he was the author of Cranmer's christening speech, but in The Beggar's Bush he puts in Higgens' mouth a ludicrous parody of a part of that speech. It is not a little astonishing that such a critic as Mr. Spedding could not see the absurdity of supposing that evidence based on peculiarities of metre can weigh against evidence based on such facts as these. If he wished to justify the ascription to Fletcher of what for more than two centuries had been held to belong to Shakespeare, it was incumbent on him to show, not by statistics of line endings or any such peddling pedantries, but by adducing proof of capacity, or at least of approximate capacity, that Fletcher was equal to its composition. This he has neither done nor made any attempt to do. Another result of Mr. Spedding's theory is that while it robs Shakespeare of most of what is best in the play, it maims and futilizes what it leaves him. Buckingham disappears with his arrest, Wolsey becomes little more than a torso, and Katharine fares very little better. Forlorn indeed are the proportions to which Shakespeare is reduced.

ing differences in style and the numerous infirmities in the play are to be accounted for partly by the fact that it was composed in different periods of Shakespeare's career, and partly by the fact that they are the result of an attempt to utilize for practical purposes a scheme which he had more than once abandoned because as an artist he had found it unmanageable. The probability is that he had originally conceived, as Mr. Spedding conjectures, "the idea of a great historical drama on the subject of Henry VIII., which would have included the divorce of Katharine, the fall of Wolsey, the rise of Cranmer, the coronation of Anne Bullen, and the final separation of the English from the Romish Church." Here was a noble theme a theme which may well have fascinated the poet of King John. But he must soon have discovered the immense difficulty of comprising so much within the compass of a single drama. As the important and impressive events necessarily to be woven into the plot, and the great historical figures which were a part of them, came thronging on his imagination, he must have felt that he was in the position of a painter whose canvas was too narrow for what had to be crowded into it.

He probably made his first experiment comparatively early in his career, about the time he was engaged on King John and Richard the Second, or possibly later. There cannot be the smallest doubt that the greater part of the drama was composed in Elizabeth's reign. Not Cranmer's speech only, but the pointed references to her in the play, "From this lady [i. e., Anne Bullen] may proceed a gem to lighten all this isle," and more especially such a remark as Henry's:

Ye have been too prodigal.

I thank ye heartily; so shall this lady,
When she has so much English,

a remark which must have been particularly offensive to James I.—all place this beyond reasonable question. Elze plausibly conjectures that it may have been intended for production on the seventieth anniversary of Anne Bullen's marriage, in 1603, but that it was put aside in consequence of the Queen's death. It seems to me highly probable that in this its earlier form it was intended for production at or about that date, but that it

was put aside not on account of the Queen's death, but for other reasons. It is a play which would never for one moment have been exhibited in the reign of the great Queen. To suppose that she Iwould have allowed either her father or her mother to be depicted as they are depicted here, that she would have tolerated such a pathetic presentation of the woman whom her mother superseded, that she would have permitted herself to be publicly exhibited as a puking baby or to be referred to as an aged virgin," is to suppose what is improbable to the point of impossibility.

re

Nor is this all. Mr. Gerald Massey was, I believe, the first to point out that Buckingham's speech is in its most important features simply a production of the speech made by Essex on the scaffold, and that the account of his trial given in the dialogue between the two gentlemen is an exact account of the trial of Essex. This would have had no point in 1613; it went home to every soul in London between 1601 and 1603. It is quite possible that Shakespeare, then a young man, did not realize these objections to his drama, and that he may have thought that Elizabeth's sympathies would have been with him when he thus recalled, as he did in Julius Cæsar, the fate of her favorite. But the moment the play was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain there could be no doubt what its fate must have been.

Assuming, then, that the greater part of Henry VIII., as we now have it, was composed early in Shakespeare's career, no difficulties at all are presented by the style and the versification. The lexis, rhythm, and tone are simply in essentials what we find in Shakespeare's own earlier style. The speeches of Buckingham, Wolsey, and Cranmer are simply variants on the rhythm of the earlier historical plays: the redundant syllable, if not quite, is almost as common as here in Richard the Second:

That Mowbray hath receiv'd eight thousand nobles

In name of lendings for your highness' soldiers,

The which he hath detain'd for lewd employments,

Like a false traitor and injurious villain.

VOL. CXVIII.-No. 706.-77

The infirmities in the structure of the play are probably to be accounted for by the fact that, despairing of his attempt to make it satisfactory as a work of art, and as such troubling himself no more about it, he resolved to utilize it as a court pageant. Having failed, for the reasons stated, to do this in 1603, he made a second attempt in 1613. On this occasion it was particularly necessary to emphasize the triumph of Protestantism, and so, for a fifth act, he languidly set to work with ludicrous indifference to dramatic propriety, but with much relevance to the occasion, to versify Fox's account of the events attending the birth of Anne Bullen and Gardiner's feud with Cranmer. He did not even take the trouble to remove from the drama what would be calculated to annoy James, satisfying himself by throwing a sop to his royal master by an awkward interpolation in a eulogy to that monarch's hated predecessor. What happened is what might have been expected to happen. The unfortunate poet fared with James' Lord Chamberlain as he had probably fared with Elizabeth's, though without being prohibited from exhibiting his play on the Bankside. Among the Rawlinson MSS. in the Bodleian is a list of the plays produced at court between the feast of St. Michael's, 1612, and the feast of St. Michael's, 1613; they are twenty-four in number, including The Tempest and Julius Cæsar, but they do not include Henry VIII. To his mortification, no doubt-though what else could he have expected? he was obliged to content himself with the plaudits of the Globe.

I venture to submit, then, that the whole of Henry VIII. is from Shakespeare's pen: that the differences in its characteristics of style and verse are to be attributed to the fact that it was composed at different periods in his career, and that its infirmities as a drama are to be accounted for by the fact that when he found he had attempted an impossible task he abandoned it, but seeing that what he had done could be utilized for practical purposes, turned it in a desultory way to account, ceasing, however, as an artist to have any serious interest in his work.

HE fair green in Ballyguthrie stood empty in a blaze of August sunshine. The shops were open. Their windows were decked with goods-inappropriate oilskin coats, cheap corsets, and rolls of flannellet in the drapery stores; whiskey, tobacco, and advertisements of transatlantic steamers in those of the grocers but there were no customers to buy anything. Nor were customers expected. On Saturday, which is market day, and on fair days the town does business. At other times its inhabitants enjoy the abundant leisure of a wealthy aristocracy.

At twelve o'clock, just as the angelus bell was ringing, a motor-car drove into the town and stopped at the door of the hotel: Mr. Michael O'Clery's hotel, advertised as The Imperial " in the railway guide. A gentleman, alert-looking, well dressed, of middle height, stepped from the car and entered the hotel. A few minutes later the chauffeur followed him, carrying a couple of bags. The car, a large and opulent-looking vehicle painted bright yellow, was left standing in the street. Two policemen emerged from the barrack at the opposite side of the fair green and contemplated the car from a distance, stately and dispassionate observers. The owners of the various shops, drapers and publicans, appeared at their doors and stared at the

car.

Three small boys, eying the police dubiously, approached the car and prodded its tires with their fingers. Father Cassidy, a book in his hand, left the presbytery, walked slowly past the hotel, and inspected the rugs which littered the tonneau. Mr. Patsy Flanagan, chairman of the Urban District Council and proprietor of the Connaught Democrat, came out of the office of his paper and turned into the Imperial Hotel. He found Mr. O'Clery behind the bar, and was immediately served with a pint of porter.

"Let him be damn!" said Mr. Flanagan. "It's a returned Yank he is, and I don't hold with them ones, coming back here and insulting the country that gave birth to them, rising the minds of the people and and encouraging emigration, which is the curse of Ireland.”

"He's no returned Yank, but an American gentleman. Didn't he ask for a bath the minute he came inside the house -a bath with warm water in it, no less? Would a returned Yank be wanting the like? Tell me that, now."

"Be damn!" said Mr. Flanagan. The evidence of the bath was conclusive against his hypothesis. He took a second pint of porter and threw out suggestions about the nature of the American gentleman's business in Ballyguthrie. Lingering over a third pint, he was gratified, as he hoped he would be, by the appearance of the stranger, who seemed an affable and friendly man.

"I'll have some lunch," he said to Mr. O'Clery, as soon as you can get it ready. After that I'd like to go round